In this morning’s kick-off to Tradeshift’s analyst day, founder and CEO Christian Lanng shared some numbers around their network growth. His claim (not validated) is that Tradeshift is the “fastest growing supplier network” in the market, with growth that is “three to four times faster” than “Ariba and OB10.”

Spend Matters note: If you’re reading our coverage word-for-word, you’ll note that Christian has already singled out Ariba and OB10 multiple times. Aside from competitive comparisons on the part of Tradeshift, it is safe to say that both Ariba and OB10 are growing quite rapidly as well.

But getting back to Tradeshift. In terms of network metrics by the numbers, Christian shared the following metrics:

160,000 active suppliers (“active” was not defined – most providers have different definitions of active)

547,000 suppliers in process of being on-boarded today (“based on new and current customers”)

Bringing in “thousands of suppliers per week”

$274 billion in annual spend on customer side (Tradeshift claim: “Ariba has $350 billion in spend”)

Active users in 193 countries

For growth, Christian shared that one of the keys for Tradeshift is trying to win the largest buyers in respective markets. He calls it: “Elephant hunting … chasing bigger deals.” The reason for this is no doubt tied to supplier enablement – get suppliers on-boarded for the largest providers in a market and it’s easier to get everyone else in tow. Ultimately the goal is to make the platform “the goal for all business interactions” by capturing SMB and larger suppliers/partners alike in the network ecosystem.

Another enablement strategy is to focus on the smallest part of the market by partnering with Intuit/Quickbooks to drive supply-side invoice volume directly integrated into small business accounting packages (we’ll be featuring insight from a dedicated session on this partnership later this morning).